Systems pharmacology
Systems pharmacology is the application of systems biology principles to the field of pharmacology. It seeks to understand how drugs affect the human body as a single complex biological system.
Instead of considering the effect of a drug to be the result of one specific drug-protein interaction, systems pharmacology considers the effect of a drug to be the outcome of the network of interactions a drug may have. In 1992, an article on systems medicine and pharmacology was published in China. Networks of interaction may include chemical-protein, protein–protein, genetic, signalling and physiological. Systems pharmacology uses bioinformatics and statistics techniques to integrate and interpret these networks.
Systems pharmacology can be applied to drug safety studies as a complement to pharmacoepidemiology.
